Proving the ROI of Customer Data Management

As a Marketer, making intelligent and well informed decisions when it comes to MarTech spend is vital to remaining competitive and relevant in an increasingly digital landscape.

When considering a customer data and engagement platform, it is important that marketers understand how this tool can make their life easier and provide value by bringing together important efficacy data. A recent McKinsey and Company study found personalization can provide 5-8x the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales by 10% or more. So how does ingesting, filtering, connecting, and enriching data lead to personalization and contribute to performance lift? The answer lies in three core components: speed, omni-channel messaging, and operational efficiencies.

The speed in which marketers can realize value on their data matters. And, it matters a lot. Today, true competitive advantage lies in creating a customer experience that is personal, fast, and meaningful. Customer data has diminishing value over time. Customer segments that are not updated in real-time, for example, can lead to inaccurate targeting. For this reason, customer data and engagement platforms like SessionM are designed and built for immediate impact. Once it gets rolling, the platform automates processes that normally take up to weeks to accomplish, allowing you to climb the time to value curve and unlock opportunities that are unattainable with manual segmenting and data connection.

“With SessionM, we have reduced the manual deployment of personalized offers from weeks to real-time, saving us time and reducing accidental earning–ultimately generating more revenue for our brand” -Starbucks

Savvy marketers understand the impact that an omni-channel approach will have on revenue and growth. In the retail industry alone over 87% of retailers agree that an omni-channel marketing strategy is critical to their success. However, capitalizing on the omni-channel advantage requires teams to have actionable omni-channel data. Customer data in general is collected from several different touchpoints (e.g. email, SMS, point of sale, mobile apps) which is then stored in and operated by siloed systems. Customer data and engagement platforms work to break down these internal data silos that hinder most organizations from being able to perform effective omni-channel marketing. By connecting these disparate systems and creating 360 degree profiles per customer, marketers gain an understanding of how customers are interacting with each individual touchpoint that they can then use to provide next level service, product knowledgeability, and a frictionless experience. This broader understanding of their customer base and personalized shopping experience inevitably builds deeper brand loyalty amongst existing and new customers.

A standard human-based marketing workflow involves a marketer defining a segmentation strategy and then relinquishing control to IT, who typically owns the customer database. By automating this process, which can take weeks to accomplish, customer data and engagement platforms save time and cut costs while giving control of the customer database back to marketers through a holistic view that can be used to create personalized customer journeys across all channels. While playing fast is paramount to an organization’s success, it is also important to play smart. Sophisticated machine learning is layered into platforms like SessionM to dynamically enhance customer profiles. This enables organizations to model and optimize that timing and targeting of messages and offers through different channels by the individual customer. Organizations will gain a deeper customer knowledge, thereby increasing engagement and conversion, and improving return on MarTech spend.